The State of eBooks in Academic Libraries: Acquisition and the User Experience By Andrea Ferro (Global Account Development, Casalini Libri) <andrea.ferro@casalini.it>
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asalini libri — along with its recently acquired partner Companies Erasmus Boekhandel and Houtschild International Bookseller — is one of the leading suppliers of publications in print and e- format — from across Europe and beyond — to libraries and institutions worldwide. Being an e-content aggregator with a longtime expertise in Romance-language publications in the humanities and social sciences, our experience may differ from that of Anglo-American vendors. Our content is mostly “niche,” and this certainly affects — at least to a certain extent — acquisitions patterns, usage numbers, etc. That said, I think common trends can be found and our perspective, albeit partial, can be quite interesting. We at Casalini Libri have been able to observe the progress of eBook acquisitions in academic libraries from a privileged vantage point, being, since 2000, an e-content aggregator serving libraries worldwide. From the first release of our Casalini digital library to the current iteration of our Torrossa full-text platform (access.torrossa.com), we have seen different approaches to eBook acquisitions, different user behaviors, and different publisher strategies. Ultimately, we’ve seen how things have gradually changed, with accelerations and setbacks, over the course of two decades. Libraries’ challenges and frustrations were Casalini’s challenges and frustrations, and all of our projects involving eBooks were community-driven initiatives. We have always tried to listen to the community and to interpret and address libraries’ and publishers’ different (and sometimes conflicting) needs and expectations, in a constant and productive dialogue with all the stakeholders. Not every library was created equal, and publishers and vendors should always be as creative as possible to address each and every need. One thing that has certainly changed since we first launched the Casalini Digital library is the role eBooks play in the larger picture of library acquisitions. Back then, eBooks were just an “accessory,” a complement to existing print collections. Therefore, it wasn’t actually a matter of “choosing between the two” formats: they just coexisted and showed different usage patterns. While print was intended for current, frontlist content, digital was mainly used for bringing back to life (and to circulation) older materials, making them available again through digitization. This was especially true in our subject areas, the humanities and social sciences, where content tends to stay relevant longer. In the early 2000s, eBook collections were basically archives of retrospectively digitized content. Publishers didn’t release a “native” e-version of their publications at the same time as the print, therefore the number of titles made available was only a matter of how technologically sound the publishers were and how many resources they were able to devote to the digitization of their books. Only a few publishers were able (or visionary enough) to invest in massive digitization projects and in workflows that allowed them to release the print and the e- at the same time. There was also a sort of hesita-
Against the Grain / February 2022
tion about what the best strategy would be: many publishers feared that eBooks could “cannibalize” print sales, and piracy was a concern as well. For many years libraries continued to buy eBook packages, either multi-publisher collections or subject-based ones. Pricing was favorable, with collections costing a fraction of the sum of the prices of the individual titles included therein. Customization of the content wasn’t much of a need, either. But as soon as the collections started to grow and to include even more current content, prices gradually increased, and a new trend emerged: custom “Users nowadays or tailor-made collections, where are extremely selectors and librarians alike played an important role. demanding Budgetary constraints forced many universities to review their spending, and that process moved along two parallel lines: the departure from a packages-oriented model and the implementation of metrics.
and impatient ... When a subpar experience lets users down, it’s extremely difficult to gain their trust back and retain them.”
While the departure from a model of acquisitions based mainly on packages was quite easy to manage for libraries, publishers and aggregators alike, the increasing importance of metrics and usage statistics in the decision-making process was difficult to deal with, especially for an aggregator like Casalini, specializing in “niche” content and in “minor” languages. Measuring the importance or relevance of a book published in Italy in 1960 about Dante’s philology against the same parameters used for an engineering or medicine title can bring unintended results. All these factors, combined, led to a new development, the rise of new, more flexible acquisition models: custom collections, PDA, DDA, EBA and the like. We at Casalini were able to quickly adapt to these new models, mainly because of our robust inhouse bibliographic department and our highly skilled approval selectors, who were key in helping libraries create tailor-made collections based on their budget and subject requirements. Also, our in-house software development department was instrumental in supporting the various new services and features of our eBook platform, especially the PDA programs. Soon enough another issue emerged: libraries were increasingly interested in more current content, which wasn’t always available at the same time as print — in many cases a deliberate choice on the part of the publishers. Therefore, new business models started to emerge, from embargoes to tiered pricing, from stricter user permissions to limitations on the number of concurrent users. The eBooks market became harder to navigate, and in our capacity as aggregators of multiple publishers’ content, we had to be extremely careful to try to find a common denominator, in terms of licensing and usage permissions
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